Liu Xiaobo 1955- Chinese Writer and Human Rights Activist Winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize BIRTH Liu Xiaobo was born on December 28, 1955, in Changchun, China, a large, industrial city in the northeastern part of the country and the capital of Jilin province. His parents were intellectuals, and his father was employed as a university professor. He has an older brother, Liu Xiaoguang, and a younger brother, Liu Xiaoxuan, who heads the engineering college at the Guangdong University of Technology. YOUTH Little information is available about Liu’s early life. After middle school, he followed his parents to a rural area in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China, where they lived from 1969 to 1973 during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—a social movement initiated by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong to align the areas of education, art, and literature with communist ideology. As was typical of the educated youth of his generation, he was sent to the countryside at age 19 and spent two years laboring in a people’s commune in his home province of Jilin. Referencing this time in Liu’s life, his close friend Yang Jianli, now in exile, told the Guardian: “Some took it as suffering and thought they should reward themselves when they had power and money later. Liu Xiaobo took it as experience that helped him understand the real suffering of the Chinese people at the hands of the Chinese government.” In 1976 Liu got a job as a construction worker in his hometown of Changchun, the automotive hub of China. EDUCATION When the Communist Party reinstated the national university entrance exam in 1977 in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Liu was admitted to Jilin University to study Chinese literature. While in college, he and six of his schoolmates formed the poetry group The Innocent Hearts, and Liu became interested in Western philosophy. After graduating from Jilin University in 1982, he attended Beijing Normal University, earning a master’s degree in Chinese literature in 1984. He lectured at Beijing Normal while completing his postgraduate studies and received his Ph.D. in Chinese literature in 1988; he was the first student to obtain a doctorate degree in literature under the communist system. CAREER HIGHLIGHTS In 1987 Liu published his first book, the nonfiction bestseller Criticism of the Choice, in which he challenged the ideology of professor Li Zehou, an influential voice in the intellectual community at the time. He also criticized the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, a system of ethical and philosophical principles based on the teachings of the ancient Chinese thinker Confucius. Liu became a professor at Beijing Normal in 1988 and worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Oslo, the University of Hawaii, and Columbia University in New York. His academic career ended abruptly in 1989 when he decided to return home to participate in the prodemocracy demonstrations underway in Beijing. He published The Fog of Metaphysics, a comprehensive survey of Western philosophies, that same year. Tiananmen Square Protests On April 27, 1989, Liu returned to Beijing to take part in the student-led prodemocracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, cutting short his lecture series at Columbia to join the movement. The protests began with a student march through the capital city in memory of Hu Yaobang, a recently deceased political leader who favored social and economic reform. Liu rushed home to become an advisor to the student movement. One of few professors to offer direct assistance to the protesters, he provided strategic guidance and gave speeches in support of their cause. The students called for freedom, democracy, and human rights for Chinese citizens, who face limits on many civil liberties, including freedoms of expression, association, and religion. In China, the Communist Party holds a monopoly on political and judicial power. In addition, the government censors telecommunications and media coverage, and police monitor the activities of those suspected of opposing government policy. On June 2, 1989, Liu staged a hunger strike with three other demonstrators to protest the use of military force to evacuate Tiananmen Square. He called for both the students and the government to abandon the ideology of class struggle in favor of a political culture based on dialogue and compromise. In a written statement issued at the start of the hunger strike and translated into English in London’s Independent newspaper, the protesters urged: “We must do this because hatred can only produce violence and dictatorship. We must adopt the spirit of tolerance. We must begin to build up Chinese democracy with a democratic spirit of tolerance and concept of co-operation. Democratic politics is a politics without enemies, without hatred. Instead it means a politics based on mutual respect, mutual tolerance, and mutual compromise, through consultation, discussion, and the electoral process.” Unfortunately, Liu was powerless to prevent bloodshed in Tiananmen Square. On June 4, 1989, following seven weeks of peaceful student protests, the Chinese army killed hundreds—possibly thousands—of demonstrators in an event known as the June 4th Massacre. Liu, however, played a critical role in preventing slaughter on a much larger scale. On the night of June 3rd, before the army forced the protesters out of Tiananmen Square using tanks and guns, Liu disarmed a group of workers who were prepared to fight the troops. Seizing and smashing a rifle during a rally shortly before the military crackdown, he emphasized the importance of peaceful, rather than violent, resistance, arguing: “Whatever extreme the government takes will help it dig its own grave.” He negotiated the nonviolent retreat of several thousand protesters, brokering a deal with the army to allow the last demonstrators to evacuate the square in the final hours of the conflict. Witnessing the government’s violent response to the Tiananmen Square protests was, as Liu put it, a “major turning point in my 50 years on life’s road.” On June 6, 1989, he was arrested for his role in the prodemocracy movement. He was expelled from Beijing Normal University three months later, and his writings were banned. The government issued publications and news reports denouncing him as the “black hand” and “madman” behind the movement. Reflecting back on the government’s actions against him, Liu explained: “Merely for publishing different political views and taking part in a peaceful democracy movement, a teacher lost his lectern, a writer lost his right to publish, and a public intellectual lost the opportunity to give talks publicly.” Liu spent 19 months in detention before being convicted of “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement” in January 1991. He avoided a prison sentence on account of his “major meritorious action” in preventing further bloodshed in Tiananmen Square. Human Rights Activism Upon his release, Liu immediately resumed writing, focusing on the topics of human rights and politics. “Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth,” he explained. Although his works were still banned in China, he published the memoir The Monologues of a Doomsday’s Survivor in Taiwan in 1992. Despite the dangers of being an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, he remained dedicated to the prodemocracy movement. “Living in an authoritarian society, doing the prodemocracy work that I do, the possibility of being sent to prison at any time doesn't actually scare me too much,” he said. “… The way I see it, people like me live in two prisons in China. You come out of the small, fenced-in prison, only to enter the bigger, fence-less prison of society.” In May 1995 he was taken into custody for petitioning the government to initiate political reforms and reassess its response to the Tiananmen Square protests. Authorities held him under residential surveillance before arresting him in October 1996 for questioning the merits of China’s single-party political system, criticizing China’s policy toward Taiwan, and calling for a dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama of Tibet. He was sentenced to three years in a reeducation-through-labor camp for “disturbing public order” through his statements. Liu was released in 1999. At the turn of the millennium, he continued writing articles on political reform in his country and published compilations of political criticism and poetry in Taiwan and Hong Kong. He also petitioned for freedom of expression and the release of prisoners. In addition, he sought compensation for the families of victims of the June 4th Massacre through his work with the Tiananmen Mothers, a support group formed by parents of students killed in the 1989 protests. In 2001 he established an Internet connection in his home, using this tool to distribute his writings. “The Internet is God’s present to China,” he said. “It is the best tool for the Chinese people … to cast off slavery and strive for freedom.” In 2004, however, authorities cut his phone line and Internet connection when he released an essay criticizing the government’s use of “subversion” charges to silence authors and activists. He was detained overnight and thereafter subjected to regular police surveillance, signaling a government crackdown on outspoken intellectuals. From 2003 to 2007 Liu served as president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an association of independent writers. The organization’s mission is to defend freedom of expression, which in other countries is a basic civil right. It provides assistance to those writers who are threatened, harassed, and convicted of crimes on account of their words. PEN is a worldwide association affiliated with the United Nations that advocates on behalf of authors persecuted for their opinions.